mentally ill individuals tended to smoke more cigarettes

Many doctors who treat individuals suffering from mental disease like depression tend not to hassle them about their smoking habits because they feel that the stress which quitting could induce could make their psychological problems worse.

Professor Brian Hitsman from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine however claims that this is not the case and that more needs to be done to get the mentally ill to quit. Professor Hitsman recently published a research paper along with a plan to help psychiatrists to get their patients to quit. The research which was printed in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry explained that doctors who treat mentally ill individuals tend to focus on their psychiatric health and thus they "lose track" of the physical aspects of their health.

He also pointed out that mentally ill individuals tend to smoke far more than the rest of the population and therefore they needed special attention and more effort to help them quit. He pointed out that between 40 and 80 percent of mentally ill people smoked whereas only twenty percent of psychologically healthy people did the same. He also stressed that mentally ill individuals tended to smoke more cigarettes every day than mentally healthy smokers.

Professor Hitsman also pointed out that there was no evidence in any clinical trial that the symptoms of mental illness got worse after quitting cigarettes and that seven individual clinical studies actually showed that negative psychiatric symptoms lessened while undergoing smoking cessation treatments. A smoking addiction in itself could be a cause of depression and curing the addiction could improve the confidence and general well being of depressed and anxious individuals.

Smoking cessation for mentally ill people should be recommended by their psychiatrists and individual treatment plans should be worked out. The use of the smoking cessation drugs like Champix should only be used with a prescription from your doctor and counseling should be an integral part of the whole smoking cessation attempt.